White House Photo

In the eyes of the negotiators, the nuclear agreement struck in the middle of the night between the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) and Iran last month provides both parties with concessions that they have been desperately seeking since the Iranian nuclear standoff began ten years ago. For the United States and its European, Russian and Chinese allies, the accord forces Tehran to freeze progress on its nuclear program for a period of six months while negotiators try to seek a comprehensive agreement next year. Among other requirements explicitly stated in the deal, Iran will not be able to enrich uranium at the 20 percent level, construction on its plutonium reactor at Arak will be scrapped, its stock of 20 percent uranium will be diluted to a less-usable form for weapons and no new centrifuges will be installed at any of its sites.

In exchange, Tehran will receive approximately $6-7 billion of its own money that was previously frozen in foreign bank accounts. And for the duration of the agreement, the P5+1 countries have pledged not to enact more sanctions on Iran’s nuclear work.

All parties walked away from a grueling set of negotiations relatively pleased with what they ended up with. Back in Washington, however, President Barack Obama will have a very difficult time trying to persuade lawmakers and pro-Israel groups alike that the deal does enough to constrain Iran’s ability to make a nuclear weapon over the next six months.

The nuclear agreement was met in Washington with cautious optimism in some quarters and downright opposition in others. Mere hours after the P5+1-Iran negotiations successfully concluded, members of Congress from both parties took to the nation’s major television networks voicing their displeasure. Referring to agreement’s failure to prohibit Iran from enriching any uranium on its soil, Senator Bob Corker, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, commented that the Iranians were “spiking the football in the end zone.” Senator Charles Schumer, a vocal Obama ally and the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, said he was “disappointed” that Tehran would be receiving billions of dollars in sanctions relief in exchange for simply freezing their capability. Congressman Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, registered the same disbelief on CNN. “I don’t think you make [Iran] bargain in good faith by going squishy,” he said.

Strong words of opposition by itself do not pose much of a political headache for the Obama Administration — even if some of those words are coming from within the president’s own party. Yet unfortunately for the White House and State Department, words are being matched with concrete action in the halls of Congress. (more…)

Could China and Russia find ways to work together in Afghanistan after NATO troops pull out in 2014? Dr. Marcin Kaczmarski, a Wikistrat Senior Analyst and Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw, explains why such an alliance might be one of next year’s geopolitical surprises in the video below, the first in this year’s series of predictions from Wikistrat’s expert community.

Dr. Marcin Kaczmarski has studied post-Soviet politics throughout the last ten years as an academic, analyst, policy advisor and media commentator. He is a lecturer in Warsaw University’s Institute of International Relations and previously held positions at Aberystwyth University in Wales and the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek. Between 2006 and 2012, Dr. Kaczmarski worked as senior fellow on Russian foreign policy at the Centre for Eastern Studies in Warsaw. He writes about Sino-Russian relations at his blog, Between Moscow and Beijing.

Stay tuned to hear more from Wikistrat’s Senior Analysts and their predictions regarding what events could lie ahead in the coming year.

Videos from last year’s series are available in our YouTube channel.

By Bijan R. Kian, Guest Post

Facebook and Twitter are illegal in Iran. That doesn’t automatically block Iranians’ access to these social media outlets.  A little bird (no pun intended) told me the same cyber guardsmen who block access to certain pages on the Internet, secretly share block buster programs along with filter breaker codes and keys to their friends who in turn, share the codes and keys with their friends, and as a result, it is possible to access Facebook and Twitter in Iran.

These clever workarounds don’t make life any easier for Mr. Zarif, Iran’s new Foreign Minister (FM) in President Rouhani’s cabinet. He posts on Facebook and tweets illegally! Kayhan, the ultra right daily newspaper, attacked Mr. Zarif for having placed a post on Facebook that read “I hope there aren’t voices in sync with Israel inside.” Israel opposes premature lifting of sanctions, and what Zarif meant to convey was that Iranians who oppose reconciliation with Washington are in sync with Israel! The article reminds the FM squarely that accessing Facebook is against the law. Perhaps, it serves as a warning that the Foreign Minister could be called to court or even go to jail for illegal use of the Internet.

Mr. Rouhani himself has not been immune to Kayhan’s attacks. Another article right next to the one attacking FM Zarif, peppered Rouhani with criticism of his speech at the confirmation hearing of Mr. Sajjadi, his third nominee for the post of the Minister of Sports and Youth Affairs. Kayhan’s salvos targeted the Iranian President for saying: Iranians who went to the polls in Iran’s last presidential election said “no” to arrogance and violence and said “yes” to rationality and wisdom. The article authoritatively asked Mr. Rouhani to take his divisive statement back.

With Mr. Rouhani’s emergence as the new smiling president of the Islamic Republic, I turned on my Iranian calibrated truth detector. One hundred days after activating the system, I remain skeptical about his intentions and his powers to enact any change. At the same time, for the benefit of the doubt, I wonder: What if he decides to be a Gorbachev or a Yelstin in Iran? How much of a fantasy is it to imagine Rouhani sitting on a tank refusing to take orders from the Supreme Leader? What are the chances that such a fantasy turn into reality? What are the chances that the revolutionary guardsmen suddenly realize that business as usual is no longer possible. IRGC controls the economy but in order for that control to have any value, they need to do business with the world economy. That does not seem possible with the tightening noose of sanctions. What if the IRGC thinks to itself: “Why not cause the change, keep control and turn the business machine back on?”

After all, the guardsmen carry the guns, money and the real power in Iran. Moreover, the Supreme Leader’s currency, namely his legitimacy, has devalued drastically.  Of course, if the IRGC were to cause change and keep control, they would need a smiling president and an eloquent English speaking FM. In that case, they would see nothing wrong with backing the new president and his top diplomat.

Pipe dream? May be all of this is just wishful desire to see the Iranian people free themselves from the chains of tyranny and terror placed on them by the man-made concept of God on earth or “Velayat’e Faghih” – the Supreme Leader’s claim to being Supreme. There is, however, one single act that could buy Mr. Rouhani significant instant credit—he could advocate for a law that would make access to the Internet free of all filters and restrictions. Such a law is not likely to pass the current parliament, but Mr. Rouhani can be credited for launching a national debate on free access to information. He could make an argument that morality cannot be legislated and that Iranians are smart and decent enough to manage their own access to the web. So, as an Iranian-American whose pride of his Iranian heritage is permanently coupled with his American love of freedom, I borrow a phrase from the 40^th president of the United States and shout from the top of my lungs: MR. ROUHANI, BRING DOWN THAT ELECTRONIC WALL!

About the Author

Bijan R. Kian is a former member of the board of directors of the Export-Import Bank of the United States and a former member of the White House Business Council. He is also a former director of Foreign Investment for the State of California. Twice confirmed by the Senate of the United States, he served both Republican and Democratic presidents from 2006 to 2011.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. The post originally appeared here via the Foreign Policy Association.

By Ali Wyne

Many inventories of geopolitical truths would include variants of these two assertions: (1) bipolarity defined the period between about 1950 and 1990—a period that, at least when juxtaposed against the destruction of 1939-45, was one of tranquility; and (2) the dissolution of the Soviet Union yielded “unipolarity” and unleashed unprecedented peace and prosperity.

Given the pervasiveness of these judgments, it is illuminating to recall how contentious they once were, if not surprising. Near the end of his time as President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Henry Wriston asserted that “contemporaries [have] almost never identified the dominant elements of their own time accurately” (although one might add that those who reflect on the past often overlook crucial phenomena or succumb to facile revisionism). He elaborated:

Distinctive eras are identified and get their accepted names long after they are past, seldom or never from contemporaries. At best the concept of an age remains imprecise, and even when historians reach some agreement upon a name…the dates assigned by different scholars to its onset and its passing will vary a century or more at either end. Even when it has been named there will still be dispute as to which of its characteristics are the essential ones.

Consider the Cold War. In early 1964, when most would contend that the world was firmly bipolar, Roberto Ducci argued  that “neo-nationalism” and “neo-neutralism” were, in fact, sowing the “‘atomization’ of international society.” He went further, contending that the conditions that would be required “to have once again a bipolar world” were “obsolescent.” In mid-1973, nearly two decades before the Berlin Wall would fall, Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke of “World War II and the subsequent cold war” (emphasis mine), almost as if to suggest that the Cold War had come to an end. While he did not, of course, argue that U.S.-Soviet competition had become inconsequential, he did believe that its centrality in geopolitics had declined. To address what he regarded as the world’s principal challenges—“social fragmentation brought about by poverty” and the “collapse of the global ecosystem”—he proposed “closer American-European-Japanese cooperation.”

While it is often observed that the prospect of mutually assured destruction had a stabilizing impact on geopolitics, not all analysts who lived through the Cold War were  as sanguine. In light of the mid- to late-1970s ascension of pro-Soviet parties in several African and Asian countries, Donald Zagoria feared that “the spread of communism and Soviet power [would] upset tenuous regional balances of power, lead to intensified regional instabilities, and make even more difficult the settlement of a variety of regional clashes that could lead to war.” And as the 1970s drew to a close, Hedley Bull alleged “the abandonment by the superpowers of their postures as responsible managers. The work of erecting a structure of cooperation has been abandoned, and what had been put in place is beginning to decay.” He was more alarmed a few years later, concluding not only that it had become illusory to believe that U.S.-Soviet cooperation could underpin the international system, but also that geopolitics was “return[ing] to the pattern of the 1930s.” “The impulses towards…international improvement,” he warned, “seem everywhere to have weakened.”

The end of the Cold War likewise produced intense debate about the nature of  international order.  In Spring 1992, Joseph Nye observed that various analysts had already identified five successors to bipolarity: a “[r]eturn to bipolarity”; “multipolarity”; a system of “[t]hree economic blocs”—one formed around the yen, a second around the dollar, and a third around the European Currency Unit or deutsche mark; “[u]nipolar hegemony”; and “[m]ultilevel interdependence.”  In his seminal 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington added another choice to the menu: “for the first time in history,” he postulated, “global politics has become multipolar and multicivilizational” (emphasis Huntington’s).

The Soviet Union’s collapse also sowed considerable consternation about the future.  In August 1990, John Mearsheimer predicted that “the prospect of major crises, even wars, in Europe is likely to increase dramatically now that the Cold War is receding into history.  The next forty-five years in Europe are not likely to be so violent as the forty-five years before the Cold War, but they are likely to be substantially more violent than the past forty-five years.” Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in February 1993, James Woolsey famously cautioned that while the U.S. had “slain a large dragon,” it now lived “in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.” He assessed that those threats—ranging from the “proliferation of weapons of mass destruction” to the “international narcotics trade”—were “harder to observe and understand” than those posed by a clear antagonist. In an influential February 1994 essay, Robert Kaplan warned that West Africa’s struggles with “[d]isease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels” offered a template for “what the political character of our planet is likely to be in the twenty-first century.”

Moving to the present, a quick Google search reveals a wide array of proposed concepts for explaining the international system and the major drivers thereof:

• Power Decay: “[T]o say that power shifting…is not enough.  Power is undergoing a far more fundamental mutation that has not been sufficiently recognized and understood….Power is decaying….battles for power are as intense as ever, but they are yielding diminishing returns.  Their fierceness masks the increasingly evanescent nature of power itself.” (Moisés Naím)
• Chaos: We live in a world “subsumed by the inexorable forces of randomness, tipped off its axis, swirling in a cloud of information overload.” (Randall Schweller)
• Nonpolarity: “The principal characteristic of twenty-first-century international relations is turning out to be nonpolarity: a world dominated not by one or two or even several states but rather by dozens of actors possessing and exercising various kinds of power.” (Richard Haass)
• G-0: We live in a world “in which no single country or bloc of countries has the political and economic leverage—or the will—to drive a truly international agenda.” (Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini)
• G-1 (U.S.): “We are not living in a unipolar moment, we are witnessing a unipolar era.” (Dan Blumenthal)
• G-1 (China): “[B]y 2030, relative U.S. decline will have yielded not a multipolar world but a near-unipolar one dominated by China.” (Arvind Subramanian)
• G-2: We are moving toward “a bipolar superpower system” consisting of U.S. and Chinese poles. (Yan Xuetong)
• G-3: We live in a world “that combines U.S. military power and consumption, Chinese capital and labor, and European rules and technology.” (Parag Khanna and Mark Leonard)
• Multipolarity: “[O]urs is a multipolar world, where the technological convergence between rich nations and capable poor ones is rapid.” (Adam Posen)
• Liberal Internationalism: “[T]he liberal international order has no competitors.  On the contrary, the rise of non-Western powers and the growth of economic and security interdependence are creating new constituencies for it.” (John Ikenberry)
• Unprecedented Interconnectedness: “The present world order is seamless….Today those theaters [Europe, Asia, and the Middle East] are more interconnected, economically and strategically, than ever.” (Robert Kagan)

One wonders if, 25 or 50 years from now, the aforementioned canon of geopolitical truths will include a widely shared appraisal of the period in which we now find ourselves: at a minimum, when it began, when it ended, and what its core characteristics were.

About the Author

Ali Wyne is an associate of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a Contributing Analyst at Wikistrat. He is also a coauthor, along with Graham Allison and Robert D. Blackwill, of Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.